It’s amazing how much all of the old comes into the new, even when you want to let it go.

I’m not a doctor or a therapist, and honestly I haven’t even talked to my therapist about this, so this may not even be actual PTSD stuff . . but it sure as fuck feels like it right now.

Packing for vacation and I’m So Fucking Stressed.

I see a bottle of water while I’m going through my mental checklist for the 100th time and wonder if we packed the cooler . . . I’m not even taking a cooler on this trip . . . and I realize, I am questioning if we packed the cooler because in every other road trip/vacation I’ve ever taken as an adult, the cooler would have the food to make it through this trip. . . . and if I forgot the cooler, I may not have had food to eat at some point on the road. . . and there wasn’t typically money to buy extra . . .or if I did, it meant scrambling to replace where I took that money from.

In day to day life I’m constantly changing what size purse I carry . . and it’s because for a long time once I didn’t have a car, I had to make sure I could carry everything I might need. It became one coping mechanism of many. Have all of the motrin and the tylenol, and the battery backup, and the headphones, but also something to occupy your brain, and extra change for the bus, and your water, and something to eat because you could get stuck in the middle of no where and then what.

The concept of, if you forget it, you can just buy one if you need it. That’s completely new to me. Not that I didn’t typically have some cash on me. And I always made stupid decisions with money, but every decision I made with money was followed by weeks of rearranging every other financial thing in my life to make sure we still ate, and that the lights stayed on . . . and making sure we didn’t get behind on bills and have to move . . AGAIN.

Or in the case of a road trip to visit family, making sure that we could still get back home at the end, without overdrawing the bank too much more than I had already planned for.

And I still have a hard time leaving my house without my water bottle and a giant fucking purse full of things that I almost never use, because it’s so hard to get out of survival mode.

And how many times have I had to remind myself that I don’t need to pack a cooler this time?